The Anatomy of Melancholy

Good discipline, education, philosophy and theology may, I cannot deny, soften and restrain these passions in a few people at certain times. But for the most part they rule, and with such violence that, like a torrent—“like a flood when its embankment breaks”—which sweeps away everything before it and overflows its banks, “lays fields flat, lays crops flat,” they overwhelm reason and judgement and corrupt the body’s balance. “The driver is swept along by his horses, and the chariot does not heed the reins.”

Now someone led in this way, says Augustine, appears to a wise person no better than a man standing on his head. Some debate “whether more serious diseases arise from the passions or from the humours”—whether humours or emotional disturbances cause the graver illnesses. But we find our Saviour’s words in Matthew 26:41 entirely true: “The spirit is willing, the flesh is weak”; we cannot resist.

And so with these words of Philo the Jew: emotional disturbances often harm the body and are very frequent causes of melancholy, wrenching it from the hinges of its health. Vives compares them to winds upon the sea: some, like great gusts, merely rock the ship, while other, tempestuous winds overturn it altogether.

Those that are slight, mild and infrequent seem to us to do little harm, and we therefore disregard them. Yet if they recur, these disturbances penetrate the mind as rain penetrates a stone, says Augustine. And, as one writer observes, they eventually produce an established disposition to melancholy; once they have gained mastery over our souls, they may rightly be called diseases.

How these passions produce this effect has been treated at length by Agrippa in Occult Philosophy, book 1, chapter 63; Cardan, On Subtlety, book 14; Lemnius, On the Hidden Wonders of Nature, book 1, chapter 12, and book 1, chapter 16; Suárez, Metaphysical Disputations, disputation 18, section 1, article 25; Timothy Bright, chapter 12 of his Treatise of Melancholy; Wright the Jesuit, in his book The Passions of the Mind; and others.

Briefly, it happens like this. Through the external senses or memory, some object to be understood reaches our imagination, which resides in the front part of the brain. Misconceiving or magnifying it, the imagination immediately communicates it to the heart, the seat of all emotions. The pure spirits at once flock from the brain to the heart through certain hidden channels and report what good or bad object has been presented. The heart immediately sets itself to pursue or avoid that object, drawing other humours along to assist it. Thus in pleasure, a great quantity of purer spirits gathers; in sadness, much melancholy blood; in anger, choler.

If the imagination is highly receptive, intent and violent, it sends a great quantity of spirits to or from the heart, making a deeper impression and a greater disturbance. As the bodily humours are correspondingly prepared, and the constitution itself is ill or well disposed, the passions last longer and grow stronger. The first beginning and source of all our troubles of this kind is therefore “impaired imagination,” which misinforms the heart and causes all these disorders, this alteration and confusion of spirits and humours.